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January 2017: ‘appy New Year!

I thought of possibly trying to just sort of publish this post and say nothing about how it’s a year old!!!!! But yeah. You can tell that I decided against that. Instead, I’m highlighting this fact, shrugging my shoulders, and reframing it so that I can embrace it and be all “YEAAAAH!!! FINALLY GETTIN’ IT DONE!!!”

My life and career have become very intense as of late, and blogging has obviously gone on the back burner. So what I’m hoping to do is share what we did last year in one post followed by another post sharing what we’ve done this year. Trying to keep up with the months should give me a goal to reach for while getting this here blog caught up on all of our shenanigans. Theoretically.

Here goes nothing!

I had the idea for the ‘appy New Year theme during Holly Storck-Post’s (of Let the Wild Rumpus Start& Storytime Undergroundfame) presentation about early literacy apps at the 2016 Nevada Library Association conference. She talked about her library’s Appy Hour program and I was like “I KNOW JANUARY’S THEME!” I even drew stars and hearts around this idea in the small notebook that I had for notetaking.

And a few months later – voila! It was our theme!

Our fabulously talented Natasia had a fun time putting together the front window display featuring emojis. This was long before the Emoji Movie existed and we were taken aback at how popular this theme was. I lost count of how many kids would come in and say something like “I LOVE EMOJIS!!!”

The biggest app that we highlighted was our library’s account with Overdrive to help both parents and kids know that we had a wonderful resource for them. In fact, we made finding 2D ereaders our scavenger hunt.

This particular scavenger hunt was a bit more challenging in that we wanted to have kids work on their writing skills. We don’t always make our passive programs this challenging for our youngest patrons, but we try and push them now and then. Needless to say, we chose books with shorter titles.

I wish that we had kept copies of the ebook scavenger hunt files to share with you, but unfortunately they are nowhere to be found. But, while searching for them, I discovered that we did keep our simple but very popular coloring sheet. Click on the image below to get a letter-sized version without my logo on it:

Finally, Natasia made a bright sign for our reading bench display. We showcased our books about computer science, technology, and video games. This proved to be a tough display to keep stocked! <<<a great problem to have!

I you look closely, you can see one of our eBook scavenger hunt pieces in the middle of our clock. It’s a Curious George eBook with a circled number on its lower right hand side.

And that’s how we kicked off 2017. I can hardly wait to show you what we did for 2018 – and hopefully I’ll be showing off much sooner than later!